Joe wept, the tears dripping off her chin, landing on Scout’s onesie.
A little while later, as Joe was working up a head of steam to go outside screaming, she realized Elliot and Scotia were gone. Vanished. Had she missed the sound of boat engines?
If she bailed the way Ell felt free to do, guess what? Scout would die.
Joe panicked.
Walked and panicked.
Panicked and stumbled.
Scout wouldn’t shut up and wouldn’t shut up.
The entire cottage reverberated with her jackhammer screams.
“Be quiet, baby, be quiet, baby, be quiet, baby,” she repeated, but no way her voice was audible over the cries. She yelled it, “Be quiet, baby!”
Scout appeared to be completely unreceptive, her face accordioned with rage.
God, why won’t she shut up? thought Joe. For a filament of a second, Joe considered shaking sense into the baby, forcing her to listen, but it came to her: That is how parents kill their kids.
She rushed to tuck Scout into the cradle. Better she cry it out than that Joe went anywhere near her again.
Joe realized just by having thought the thought, she had become, to some tiny degree, a threat to Scout’s life.
Someone who could snap.
Full of shame, Joe considered other ways out. Rooftops—Logan’s high rooftop in Toronto, the old Bloor Viaduct, pills—how many she had, what they could be used for—ceiling fixtures.
Postpartum depression?
Maybe it was.
The knock came so quietly, Joe wasn’t sure at first that she’d actually heard one. She struggled up from her nest—clothes half on, sweaty, stinky, her stitches barbed wire across her clit. Ajax stood outside with a nodding bouquet of Shirley poppies, pinks and reds.
“Hi,” Joe said.
Ajax—still in bathing suit and flip flops, grinning lopsidedly.
Joe said, “Hi, um. I guess. Hello. Come in. I’m—” She wanted to say, I’m crumbling.
“I heard the baby screaming,” said Ajax. “I know what it’s like being stuck alone at home with a newborn and I wanted to see if you’re okay, if you—you know, need anything. If I can help. At least let me get these poppies into water.”
Joe felt the burn behind the eyes, the heat around her eyeballs. “Scout’s asleep. Wore herself out.” As if it wasn’t obvious.
Ajax swished past her, found the kitchen, a vase. “Is Elliot home?”
“I haven’t seen her all day,” Joe said. “Ajax, I’m so scared!” Her hands shook; she looked at them like they didn’t belong to her. Thinking about hurting her child had been the scariest moment of her life. “I wanted to … I don’t know what I wanted to do when Scout wouldn’t stop screaming!”
Ajax drew her in for a hug.
“I know exactly what you mean. Roseanne Barr once said something like, ‘If the kids are alive at the end of the day, I’ve done my job.’”
Joe laughed and pulled away.
Ajax said, “It’s just lucky they make them cute.”
“These last years—oh, I don’t know, since we started trying to have a baby, or before that, maybe, after Ell had breast cancer, did you know Elliot once had breast cancer? I don’t know. She’s just not herself. She’s distant. She’s uninvolved, like she’s detached herself, like she’s left me without telling me.” Joe turned away, said in a strangled voice, “I’m sorry. I know that’s maudlin. I don’t even know you. I shouldn’t be telling you this.” Instead, should I tell you, Joe thought, that Logan and Elliot have sex sometimes? That Ell masturbates to images of the two of them from back when she still had titties?
She let Ajax take her into her arms again and lead her, still weeping, toward the sofa. “I’m sorry,” Joe said, “I’m just so sorry. I don’t know why I’m—”
“Honey, it’s supposed to be like this,” said Ajax. “Just because women don’t talk much about the first three months of parenting, doesn’t mean it’s not a bloody disaster for all of us. You’re a train wreck of hormones right now and you’re supposed to bawl your head off because life just sucks and you’re so fucking in love with this baby and also you wish you’d never given birth to her and you hate her guts and you’re in love with your wife but she’s an asshole and life sucks and nothing is okay no matter what anyone says about it.”
Joe looked at her in amazement. “How do you know all that?”
Ajax smiled. “You’re not re-inventing the wheel. All mamas go through it; the vast majority of us live to tell about it.”
Joe wept while Ajax enveloped her, which felt to Joe like being held together. She didn’t want Ajax to loosen her grip for fear pieces of herself would fly around the room.
“Let it out. It’s okay to be upset. It’s really hard. It’s okay to cry.”
“Why is it all on me? I thought parenting was something Ell and I were going to do together!”
“I know,” said Ajax. “It’s okay. Shhhh.”
“She’s Ell’s baby, I mean, her genetic material. Her egg and the sperm from our donor, and now, now, why isn’t she here with us? Any excuse to get into the boat and away from me.”
It went like this, back and forth, with Ajax soothing and Joe sobbing and blowing her nose. “There’s lots to be upset about,” said Ajax. “But you’re strong, Joe, and you’ll get through it, I promise. I know you will. That’s what mamas fucking do. We get through shit. If we can’t do it for ourselves, we do it for these little gumdrops we love at least while they’re sleeping.”
“Can I clone you? Where are you when it’s three a.m. and I’m pretty sure I’m the only queer mother on earth?”
Ajax held Joe out, two hands on her shoulders, then patted Joe’s face with a tissue. “It’s a really hard adjustment. It gets easier when they move out of infancy because you get more sleep and they get more entertaining.”
“I thought Ell and I would be so smitten with Scout that all we could do was walk around with smiles on our faces, beaming like idiots, but it’s not like that at all, Ajax, it’s anything but that.”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s not like that for freaking anyone. I mean, think of labour. How do you communicate just how bloody brutal that is? How would you communicate any of this?” She waved her arm at the mess and evidence of chaos—used diaper bin, clothes heaped from the dryer, clothes tossed toward a laundry basket, abandoned tea cups, Joe’s pajamas. “I have no ruddy idea. So of course people don’t know. It’s a lot of crying, diapers, spit-ups, vacant staring, mess, loneliness, and resentment, and, often, a quite unsteady love that only grows better with time.”
“I think I love her,” said Joe. She looked at Scout in the cradle and felt absolutely nothing.
“Love evolves. We expect it to be stable, but it’s a spring plant, edging up slowly, exposing its stem first, finally sticking out tiny lime-green leaves. It checks out the temperature, stops growing if it’s cold. It takes a while for it to be big.”
“But what about you and Logan? You seem big quickly,” Joe said.
Ajax said, “Maybe we’re big with love, but maybe we’re just madly infatuated. It’s too early to know for sure yet.”
“Are you taking it slow, though?”
“I’m more than cautious. I’m pedalling in reverse, even. Pushing them away so they can’t get really close.” Ajax rocked on her bum.
“They don’t seem like they’re letting you push them very far away,” said Joe. “They don’t often bring women here to begin with.”
“No?”
“Some, sure. I mean, and obviously Elliot’s here. One or two others through the years. And, you know, they’re Logan. There are some parties. They’ve had a lot of women. I’m sure you realize that.”
“I know that. But I do too.”
“I just meant to say that Logan thinks the world of you if you’re here. If you’re here, they’re probably pretty gone on you.” Joe sniffled, blew her nose.
“I hope we’re both hopeful,” said Ajax.
“I hope we do make it. I have impediments to love, though. Besides history, I mean. I’m not able-bodied.”
“Oh?”
“I guess I look okay, in my aging, decrepit way, but I have a bad heart.”
Joe put her hand on Ajax’s knee. “I’m sorry. That’s shitty.”
“For twenty years now. At least I’m aging into the disease. It isn’t as embarrassing to admit at fifty as it was at thirty.”
“Embarrassing, why?” Ell, Ell, Ell, Joe thought.
“I don’t know,” said Ajax, “I found it so goddamned humiliating. Because it made me stand out? Other dykes were leading these carefree lives, and here I was, black in a city where there are no blacks, alone with two kids and heart disease. I didn’t fit in. My life was a different thing. Clubbing? No, not clubbing.”
“Wow,” said Joe.
Ajax shrugged. “You grow into yourself eventually. I got the chance. I got to see the kids mature, and in the end, they didn’t have to manage without me.”
“I’m glad you’re still here. I’m really, really glad that you guys are here this weekend.”
“Speaking of,” said Ajax looking at the clock. “I guess the boss awaits. With that cockamamie dog and his endless slobber.”
Joe wanly smiled. “Bossy hound dogs, the both of them.”
“’Kay, sweetness,” said Ajax, kissing Joe’s forehead. “You’ll be okay, you know. Sooner or later you won’t be feeling this rotten even when Elliot’s being a total cretin. Things will ease.”
“Voice of wisdom. Thank you. Really.”
“Call me anytime. We’re just in the next cabin, you know, if you need something. Even if you just can’t stand another minute alone.”
JOE
The baby slept and slept—far longer than ever before. Joe wasn’t used to not changing diapers, not breast feeding; she guessed she should feel cheerier about a break, but she didn’t. Her throat was thick and she felt lost. She worried Scout was sick. Do something, she told herself. She sorted laundry and, wary of bending over her stitches, started a load. There was still no sign of Ell and Scotia, but the two boats were definitely gone; looking out the window again and again didn’t change that. Bad but also weird that Elliot hadn’t checked in. The idea of Elliot with Scotia, with fresh, unblemished, uncomplicated Scotia, only made her feel worse.
Joe made tea and settled back on the couch, thinking, cynically, Lactation tea.
The phone rang and she grabbed it. Linda, an old friend from Nanaimo in BC, wanted to catch up on baby news before she announced to Joe, sotto voce, that her first partner, Dree, had died in a car accident.
“Whoa,” said Joe. She braced herself on the couch.
“I’m sorry to tell you.”
At first, Joe’s voice wouldn’t come, she produced sound but not words. Then, “Do you know what happened?”
“Driving drunk. Driving stoned, maybe. The tox results will be a while. Wrapped herself around a tree. I don’t know; gossip says maybe she wanted to, maybe it was on purpose.”
Slowly, Joe waited for the news to penetrate. She said, “She was always threatening to kill herself. This is—I can’t—Poor Dree. This is really horrible.”
“I remember she was suicidal,” said Linda.
Elliot had never threatened suicide. Joe’d forgotten what a shitty piece of manipulation suicide threats could be when someone was just using them to get what they wanted. Joe thought back to the drama, the meltdowns, the scenes, the hysteria. “Why was I with Dree, for god’s sakes, Linda? Why did I think that kind of behaviour was okay? Love at first sight, I remember. And I’d had skin cancer on my back a few months before we met, went through all that treatment baloney, and she told me that she’d had uterine cancer, far worse than what I’d gone through, and it’d spread inside her abdomen. She looked at me and I looked at her—and that was it for the next five years. It’s a wonder I ever got my mechanic’s ticket, I was so distracted.”
“And the lying,” said Linda. “Remember?”
Joe made a strangled noise, said, “Know how you knew Dree was lying? Her lips were moving.”
Linda giggled.
Joe looked around the cottage, but it was suddenly a Dali painting, dripping, the clock hands running in goo down the wall, the table legs liquefying. Her life now and her insane life with Dree bled together. “She used to steal things,” she said. “I tried everything to get her to stop. I told her how embarrassing it would be if she got caught and I had to tell our friends. I begged her. I tried giving her money, buying her stuff to stop her. And she was addicted to codeine. Lord, tell me please, why was I with that lunatic?”
“She was funny,” said Linda. “Really fucking funny.”
“She is funny! She’s so funny!” Joe realized her tense was wrong, sighed. “I loved how funny she was. And warm when she wanted to turn her charm your way. But oh god, the lying, Linda! I remember right off she said she’d reimburse my plane ticket when I flew to Saskatoon to see her, and we went out shopping and she wanted a bunch of clothes and she said she’d pay me back if I used credit, and then, of course, none of that happened. Her cancer diagnosis was like dice in my brain, rattling. If there was a ninety-percent chance she’d be dead in five years, could I commit to loving her no matter what, could I take a chance on a woman who was probably going to die, soon and badly?”
“Yes,” said Linda softly. “I remember that.”
“After she moved in with me, she took over the chore of picking up my mail from the post box I had because I moved so often back in those insecure rental years, when I was always having to leave because the landlord was renovating or selling the place, or my girlfriend had left me. One day, Linda, I saw the bag Dree always took into her office, hanging on the doorknob, open, stuffed with mail. I looked; letters to me, bills mostly. I spilled them out in a way that could suggest the dog had just bumped into it—you know, a reminder to give them to me. When she got home, she just put them back in the bag, so I knew she was withholding my mail. I sat her down after dinner and called her on it. Usually I just had a wobbly case against her lies—some vaguely formed suspicion—but this time I had proof. I confronted her, and she fought me on it for four unremitting hours. She had crazy tactics! She tried chastising me: How dare you think so little of me! She tried loving me up: Oh, sweetie, I would never do anything like that. Why on earth would I? Does that make sense to you? Does that make even a smidgeon of sense? And of course it didn’t, at all, and ordinarily I would have folded. I did fold in similar arguments because she had such good points—the bad stuff never made sense, so it couldn’t be real, right? I was a battered old fiddle, and she was a bow. She was good at manipulating me. After that tactic didn’t work—and I remember, she gave that one a good hour—she switched to anger: I set her up! How fucking dare I, a fucking student, accuse her, a pharmacy tech, of lying? I ought to be ashamed of myself because, who was I, who was I? I was an asshole, that’s who I was. She wished she’d never met me. But I still stuck to my guns. What I remember now is my firmness: No, you lied. You took my mail. No, you lied. You took my mail. And her relentlessness. The conversation for her wasn’t about stealing, it was about winning. Finally, I got up and went to bed and told her she was not welcome to join me and that I’d give her one last chance in the morning, and if she didn’t come clean then, she should pack her bags and move. In the morning when I got up, she was gone. Not her stuff, just her. And there was a note that said, ‘Joe, I did steal your mail. And also, I never had cancer. I hope you can forgive me.’”
Linda said, “You never told me this before.”
“I’m not sure I’ve told anyone,” said Joe. “It was just so bizarre, and it seems even crazier looking back. I was young and vulnerable. I’d had female lovers, but I’d never been in love before Dree.” Joe considered. “Because we’d both been ill, I thought I’d met a kindred spirit. I thought, Wow, two women, recovering from sickness together. We can do this. And then, that morning she announced that the
projections I’d built our future on—all the joy and tenderness and good wishes and hope and palliative care at the end, you know—all that was bullshit. She’d stolen my mail and she lied to me about having cancer. She’d had endometriosis, not cancer. I didn’t know what to do, Linda. I felt so shattered. I felt dirty and used.”
“Yes,” said Linda. “Of course you did.” Linda talked for a minute about Dree’s current partner, Eileen, how crushed she was, her erratic behaviour as she tried to adjust to Dree’s loss.
Joe said, “Dree came back to clear out her stuff, and I wasn’t mad anymore, just hurt and broken, and I saw her and hugged her. Because I had thrown my lot in with her, and under all the bullshit, what she’d told me was good news, right? Dree wasn’t dying! She wasn’t dying!”
“I know,” said Linda. “The best news you could have gotten—that your partner was going to live. But also, for you, the worst.”
“We were in Vancouver then. Dree wanted to move back to Nanaimo, and we’d lost our housing because our landlord had sold out from under us, and I just said, Fine, let’s go back, whatever. Whatever you want. It will help you stay off codeine, right, and stop stealing.”
“And you moved here.”
“What a con woman. What a bullshit artist. I can’t even count the number of other women she got involved with while we were together.”
“I’m sorry,” said Linda. “I wonder if it’s been that bad for Eileen all these years and no one had any idea. They were together a long time. Sorry Dree was such a complete waste of space. Sorry she’s dead.”
Elliot had rigged a simple rope pull to the cradle so that every time Scout fussed, Joe could rock her without getting up, but Joe didn’t dare send her back off to sleep because she’d been under so long after her cry. “Do you know she was the number one reason I agreed to a poly relationship this time?” Joe felt a cinch in her heart about Elliot and Scotia. “So all the shenanigans would be above board. I’d know. Every goddamned time my spouse fucked someone else, I’d know all about it. Because of Dree, really.”
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